If you go back just a little over a hundred years in time, what we now know as ‘Eindhoven’ consisted of 5 villages plus the small city of Eindhoven in the midst of them. The area around Eindhoven was still mostly agricultural land comprised of small farms, sometimes barely making a living. Such industrial activities as there were at the time centered around tobacco (cigars) and textiles.
The province of North Brabant was a Roman Catholic part of the country, and that came with comparatively large families. Of old all farmers’ sons and daughters were needed to keep the little farms going, but when the mechanization of agriculture started that was no longer the case. The result: high unemployment, meaning: cheap labor. And that made this area favorable for these sorts of industries. Cigar making, for instance, was all manual labor, back then, so very labor intensive.
It was the foundation of the light bulb factory of Philips (initially manual labor!), followed by its rapid expansion into what we now know as Philips Industries, together with the coming and rising of DAF Trucks that spurred an enormous growth of the population. Since the locally available workforce soon could not deliver all the hands that were needed, the companies started attracting thousands of workers from further away. Those workers needed to live somewhere, with a massive building of houses as a result.
As the City of Eindhoven was still confined to its medieval limits at the time, these developments called for radical changes in administration. In 1920, the five villages of Woensel, Tongelre, Stratum, Gestel & Blaarthem, and Strijp were incorporated into the new Groot-Eindhoven (“Greater Eindhoven”) municipality. The prefix “Groot-” was soon dropped.
After the incorporation of 1920, the five former municipalities became districts of the municipality of Eindhoven, with Eindhoven-Centrum (the City proper) forming the sixth. Right after the incorporation the number of inhabitants was just under 48.000, compared to around 240.000 now. Roughly a five-fold growth in one hundred years.
Obviously, the factory of the brothers Anton and Gerard Philips was more than happy to advertise the title ‘City of Light’ for Eindhoven, the home base of their rapidly expanding light bulb factory. But the title is actually older than the time of Philips Industries. From the second half of the 19th century onwards, Eindhoven had a thriving match-making industry.
The match factories found a favorable environment here, due to a combination of the existing cigar-making industry and the presence of a lot of trees nearby that offered the right sort of wood for matches. And it was the match industry that had already delivered to Eindhoven the honorary title of ‘City of Light’.
Eindhoven has not only grown rapidly in the number of inhabitants. It has also grown ever stronger into its current role as the beating heart of the Brainport region. Its relatively small size notwithstanding, it has become one of the world’s leading capitals of technology, innovation, and design.
During the eight evenings of the Glow festival, the Eindhoven city center is almost completely closed to traffic. And rightfully so: more than 800.000 visitors yearly take the Glow tour. And I highly recommend you to be one of those taking the tour, at least once. If you do, you’ll have the opportunity to wholly submerge into the true city of light. Enjoy!
This blog was originally published in 2023. It has been updated to reflect new information.
